CurrentControlSet, ControlSet001, ... what??

[duragezic]

Why is there several of these in the registry? And why for example, when you do a clean install of Radeon drivers in 98, you goto ControlSet001 to remove ATI settings, yet in 2k you goto CurrentControlSet to remove them... yet the actual contents of all 3 of those look the same.

I'm just wonderiing why there is 3 of them with basically the same stuff or is it "just how the os works"?

 

[Gepost]

I think these are back-up copies of the registry. When you exit, the most recent registry is saved. If you are in NT and start it up and it is screwed up, shut off the machine before you exit. These back-ups are saved in ram until you exit. So if you have a problem with the registry and exit, NT will save the last registry, even if it was screwed up. If you have a problem with Win9x, you can boot into DOS and type in scanreg \restore. This will bring up your last four or five saved registries. If your computer worked yesterday, and then you loaded something today and screwed it up, restore the registry from yesterday or the day before. (Just learned some of this today at an NT Security seminar)

 

[Shadow07]

Well, CurrentControlSet is the current registry hive that Windows is using. The other 2 or three, are manly for two reasons:

1. Backup.
2. Hardware changes.

This is only part of the PnP Manager within Windows 2000. When you make an ERD (Emergancy Recovery Disk), this backs-up these registry entries.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

 

[duragezic]

Thanks both.

So if I wanted to make a registry change, I would make it to CurrentControlSet and it would use that (does it ever use the other ones except when it has to revert back to old settings due to an error?).

 

[MulLa]

Under normal circumstances it would always use the current one. The only time I know that it would use another one would be when you boot up using last known good mode.